Madeleines

Heston Blumenthal wooed his wife over a tray of madeleines. He suggests that you employ the same tactics

I might not be the world's most romantic man, but cooking madeleines for my wife was about as close as I got to being a regular Casanova. It was in the pre-restaurant-and-little-monster days, while I was working a regular nine-to-five week. My wife, Zanna (who used to be a midwife), had to endure what then seemed to me to be an arduous working schedule. On many a cold winter's evening, this recipe brought a ray of light to the end of a hard day's work. For some people, madeleines are the most evocative of cakes, as the famous quote from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time testifies: "One day in winter, my mother offered me some tea ... She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell ... I raised